Orthodoxy, art education and the spiritual dangers of screen technology

1. Introduction and premise

Since the topic is orthodox education my talk deals less with how an orthodox school and curriculum might look like but more with some of the spiritual preconditions for starting such a project in the first place.

The core orthodox belief is that everything flows from the Trinity and from the God-Man Christ. We are made in the image of God and are called to become like Him, we were created for participation, for communion. Everything that pulls us towards Christ is by default good, consequently everything that pulls us away from Christ is bad. We can not ignore the daring standart of St. Seraphim of Sarow that “anything that is not done for the sake of Christ is sin”.
This means that orthodox education should aim at provinding the person with tools to discover God in creation (human and nature), to learn about him or herself in relation to God and others, to find ways to serve God and others through the talents God granted and in the end to help the person become a saint. A Christian should be concerned with virtues, which come from God, and not with values which in the end always – because they are worldy - lead to the the three core temptations money, sex and power.
In the desert the devil tried to tempt Christ with the three basic human sins hedonism, avarice and the thirst for glory. Today these fuel our economy. So if orthodox education ought to exist it should be based on virtues like inner stillness and peace, excellence and conscientiousness, faith and gratitude, service and humility – which all help the person to live a life in Christ.

Part of my premise is that the struggle for an active virtuous spiritual life should be the center of the life of an orthodox Christian. I will most specifically try to show that screen media and especially the so-called smart phone is very detrimental to this task and the spiritual health of an orthodox chrisitan and to children in perticular who are yet to step on this path. I focus on the smart phone because it is the most intrusive device that we know today, we carry it with us, manage all sorts of daily things with it, communicate through it with others, get information, access things through it, we sleep next to it, go to the bathroom with it, drive with it, and so on and so on. The smart phone has become the extention of our minds and bodies.

My talk is divided roughly into ten parts. They overlap and intermingle because I come back again and again to central points which are intercennected as a web.


2. The problem with media

We all and most certainly parents nowadays are fighting against many strong demonic enemies, but one of the most prominent and cunning enemies is the screen. First the television and later video games could grip (not only) a child’s attention, hynotising the person, making them not hear or see anything else, forgetting hunger and thirst, like great ascetics immersed deeply in noetic prayer like some desert father. Today smart phones in connection with the stream of rapidy changing endless supply of images and videos, that are designed to catch attention and ignite thirst for more, have shortened the attention span drastically so that some children are not able to watch 30 minutes of a movie undistracted. The consequences are officially pathological.

The ability to pay and hold attention is key for learning, so is the ability to postpone gratification, the latter is vital for building resiliance which is central to overcoming hardships in the physical and spiritual life, to even finish any task at all. Low resiliance and weak ability to postpone gratification lead to hedonism and depression. The before mentioned vitures are underminded fataly by smart phones and social media. From an orthodox perspective we can already conclude that smart phones are harming our souls.

Nothing new, you might say and you would be right, and still we treat these devices as if we couldn’t live without them. This is understandable on the one hand because we are social beings and want to stay connected to one another, in a positive way through exchange of comfort and in a negative sense of social pornography (voyerism and gossip). St. Theophan the Recluse points out that curiosity is a passion. It is on the other hand also understandable because due to our addiction to conveniece and out of blind faith in the myth of progress we gave away the control over many supply chains and made ourselves dependent on centrelized enteties who see digitasation as a means to gain more control. It feels like we are stuck, dependent on devices that harm us and our children, because we like our – measured by the virtue of frugality and modesty enormously high - standart of living and are not willing to reduce our wants, respectively fight our avarice and comfort zone. We can conclude already that fasting is the solution.

Our children do not have at their disposal the spiritual weapons we adults are better able to acquire through prayer, through reading the Gospel and the fathers, through repentant confession and conscious participation in the other divine mysteries and through counsel by an experienced spiritual father. But they can fast. Fasting is by definition the practice of postponing gratification. But the fast has to be strickt and consistent.


3. Tool, weapons or drug?

If it takes adults almost all of their willpower to fast from such a device which was purposefully designed to get the user addicted, how in the world are we expecting children to not long for that dopamine generator all day everyday and not get irritated when they are denied access? We are junkies, so are our children. If you forget your device and feel in your body an uncomfortable feeling of lack, that’s withdrawal, your body is missing your drug. And it is a drug, bacause it was designed as one. The silicon valley tech gurus forbid their children to use these devices, that should suffice as an argument, but nevertheless: since smart phones and especially social media have entered the scene cases of youth suicide, depression, eating disorder, self-harm, ADHD etc. have inscresed extremely. The data is already in.

It is true that parents have to prepare their children for the world, it is also true that shielding children off of every possible danger does not foster resilience. So one could say that, while acknowlegding the dangers, we should teach our children how to use smart phones and social media responsibly rather than denying them access completely, because theses things are here to stay and will even spread further into human life. One can argue for it by applying a rule from the spiritual life that says that we can use the enemy’s weapon to our advantage. This would mean the smart phone is the weapon and it is up to the person how to use it - after all Orthodoxy is the middle path and not the path of the extremes. This is true in general. However applied here it is misleading because in regards to smart phones and social media we already know that they are very harmful, thus: “You will know them by their fruits” (Matt 7, 16). It is the use of the internet towards which one has to develop a measured and prudent attitude, not to the devices which all have addicting tendencies – and here we are adressing the most addicting device so far.

Orthodoxy is not only the middle path, let us not forget that it is also the narrow path (Mtth 7, 14) and “the violent take it by force” (Mtth 11, 12), equipped with “the whole armor of God” to “be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, so it should be clear that it is a spiritual struggle not “against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6, 11-13), it is a struggle and not a negotiation.

Allow me to make this point very clear: There is no such thing as a neutral tool. Tools are desiged with an immanent purpose, a telos (τέλος, end, purpose, goal), or in Aristotilian terms a final cause, causa finalis. Let’s take the knife as an example. There is no such thing as “a knife”. Knife is a abstract category, particular knives are made pointy for piercing, or blunt for smearing, scraping, they are made short for cutting tomatos or long for cutting bread, or living flesh, in this case they are called swords, they have spikes or are curved for cutting throats or coconuts. The wish to cut, smear, scrape, wound, etc. comes before the making of the knife. You could try to use a nuclear bomb to dig a tunnel into a mountain, since generally it does create holes in things, but there wouldn’t be much left of said mountain, because the purpose of the bomb is to dispose of mountains, cities, people, infrastucture as a whole. This is build into it from the beginning, otherwise it would be a badly designed bomb. Smart phones are made to catch and arrest attention, their purpose is not to proide entertaiment or information, this is merely a side effect, their true purpose is to be used all the time as an extention of the body and a mediator between the world and the user (or slave) – so that the providers can make money and controle minds. They are the consistent further development of screen media that came before which did the same, only not as effective, because it was mono-functional and stationary.

We and our spiritual state determine what a thing and its purpose will be. We are designers, we are secondary causes in God creation, sadly we took from the fruit of the knowledge of good and bad too early and lack descernment. So to use a technology wisely without harm might require the discernment of someone who – by the grace of God – reversed Adam’s fallen state far enough. We call such a person a saint.


4. Nepsis and Nous

How are you supposed to pray to God when your body, mind and soul are in love with your phone? And the everyday goal for an Orthodox Christian is prayer, is it not? The fathers, most recently St. Porphyrios and St. Paisios the Athonite, St. Joseph the Hesychast, also St. Silouan the Athonite and St. Sophrony of Essex, talk about one of the most important weapons in the spiritual struggle for the salvation of our souls - which for us as Orthodox should be our primary concern - it’s the so-called Nepsis (in combination with the Jesus Prayer), this is spiritual soberness and focus that is accompanied by stillness – this is how prayer should be. It follows logically that the never resting enemy of focus and stillness is noise and scatteredness, more precisely scatteredness of the so-called Nous.

The Nous is often called the eye of the soul or heart, it is a spiritual faculty unique to man, a spiritual organ that enables us to reconnect with God. When Adam fell his Nous was darkened but through Christ’s salvation work man was given the means by which to cleanse his heart of the passions in order to enlighten his darkened Nous and so be able to see God. This happens through synergy with Divine Grace, as fathers like St. Symeon the New Theologian or St. Gregory Palamas explain to us and instruct us. The Philokhalia is the instruction manual for how to do this. This is unique to Orthodoxy, the west lost this knowledge, so if we wish to be Orthodox and dream of orthodox education, we can not sidestep this definig fact.

The prevalent spiritual effect of modern media usage is exactly this mentioned scatteredness of the Nous. If our Nous is constantly distracted we fall prey to our passions and the demons, prayer becomes hard or non-existent and we distance ourselves from God, the path to depression and desperation and losing one’s faith is laid wide open. This is not a slippery-slope-fallacy, this is the experience of the desert fathers. Christ himself says: Be watchful! (Matth, 25,13)


5. The medium is the message

The famous media-philosopher Marshall McLuhan summarising his ideas and discoveries in his equally famous phrase “The medium is the message”, meaning that - contrary to our intuition - we are incomparably more and deeper influenced by the use of a medium than by its content. Although I disagree with is Darwinistic presuppositions and his other conclusions, it seams to be true that “nothing people can use electronic media for, no message that anyone, no matter how powerful or persuasive, can deliver, even begins to compare with what the new media has done to mankind neurologically and temperamentally. They have directly effected the human central nervous system and changed patterns of thouht and behaviour, in short, they have litterally altered human nature.” (Tom Wolfe from the introduction of “Marshall McLuhan Speaks”, 2015). So what matters is not what you use the device for but the fact that you use it at all.

Don’t misunderstand this as a downplaying of harmful content. Violence, fornication, blasphemy and other evils can be transported through all sorts of mediums, however each medium itself has its own character and influence. The technophile myth that technology is neutral is wrong. Technology does something to us. But since it does not hurt us immediately, directly, physically, we are most of the time unaware that it slowly and incrementally alters our access, our approach, our disposition to the world, to other people and to God.

For us Orthodox this is alarming because the change we seek is to become like God and not to improve the ways to be distracted from Him, but exaclty this is screen media’s deep imprint on us. It goes even further, as already mentioned above, the character of the substitute lurkes in McLuhan’s most provocative idea that through television all people could finally be united to the Body of Christ. As a convert to the Latin Church he – maybe unconsciously – follows through on the western idea of God’s grace being created and ends up at an anti-christian position which denies the true presence of God in the eucharist. There are even ideas in circles that call themselves orthodox that entertain the idea of being able to receive the eurcharist in virtual reality because with technilogical advancement we would not be able with our senses to tell the diffeerence between both realities. This directly opposed how God operates in his mysteries. God’s divine energies, his real presence in creation, can not be substituted by anyhing, not by metaphor or symbol or electronic means, at the last supper Christ clearly identified the material bread and wine as his body and his blood: “Take it; this is my body.” and “This is my blood…” (Mk 14, 22-24). Are we numbing ourselves by comforting and alluring screen technology to God’s mysteries?


6. God and other people

God is Trinity, He is communion in love, communion is the most intimate thing there is, prayer is participation in this communion, through prayer we becoming one with God by grace. But we are more in communion with the things of this world, our worries, our appetites, our sins, and our phones - our children definitely seem to be. Communion and participation also means embodied face to face encounter and not via a screen. We pray that the face of God may shine upon us, that we may see the face of God, let us not forget that the Apostles have heard with their actual ears, seen with their eyes and theirs hands have handled (1 Jh, 1,1) God in the flesh. We are embodied beings, we too are a trinity of body, soul and spirit, and not just eyes, ears and fingertips.

Since the smart phone makes the world into an object to record, exhibit and comment on, not something in which to participate fully, it does the same to our relationship to God. A smart phone – most specifically in the Liturgy - denegrades us from participants to mere spectators. There are no spectators in the Trinity, there is no salvation in spectacle, only in participation. Since communion with God is the most intimate thing to life, more intimate than the bodily union between a man and a woman, and since it happens in the mysteries like the Eucharist (and in prayer in general), taking photos or recording videos of the Eucharist being served is spiritual pornography, because what is recording intimacy with your spouse called if not pornography? Have we not heard that Christ is our bridegroom and we are his bride? What does it mean then to take photos in the bridal changer while the bridegroom is giving himself to us in the most sacrificial way possible? Today there are parishes that have webcams even in the altar room, the Divine Liturgy and even the Holy Eucharist are being filmed and displayed like any other event to be consumed.

Smart phones and social media in particular alter our relationship to other people by destroying and deconstructing the private, there is no more “secret place” where only God the Father sees into (Matth 6, 6), because the phone is always there, waiting, watching and listening.
The Church is one of the last places where there are things concealed in a mystery, things that are exclusive, things that one has to be initiated into, or even things that will never be fully revealed. Children want mystery desperately, they find a thing more interesting and attractive when they have no access to it but can anticipate it. Advertisement has been using this fact since it has hatched from its rotten egg. We long for mystery but modernity has made everything political or exhibitionistic, that means nothing shall be private anymore. But mystery is a crucial part of our life and of the life of God. Christ was born unnoticed to the public, the mother of God herself is a symbol of the concealed, the mystery, the private, the resurrection took place completely without human witnesses – (that’s why btw there is no icon of the resurrection, we have the icon of Christ’s descent into hades, the image of Christ coming out of the tomb triumphantly is western, not canonical and also not helpful).

The mobile phone makes everybody accessible all the time and therefore us more impatient with others and ourselves. So-called social media fosters a judgmental attitude towards others and towards ourselves resulting in a seesaw between inferiority complex and hybris. All this goes clearly against the beatitudes and the virtues Christ wants us to attain (Matth 5), it goes against the whole Sermon on the Mount and against the fruits of the spirit from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians. The internet makes the world bigger in an unnatural way because we experience a deminished version of persons and relationships in a diminished sensoral way - Marshall McLuhan spoke of “the global village” but he meant it in a positie way - it it rather a carricature of a village, a village where real people don’t actually have to live and grow with each other through temptations and with forgiveness. Online we encounter more people that we can process mentally which waters down our relationship to people in general, they cease to be full persons and become actors and at the same time the anticipated audience for our exhibitionism and ego. Experiencing people through screens disembodies us, lets us consume a surrogate and not commune with a real tangible person - this is de-incarnation.

The fact that the phone and social media inflate our ego should by now be common knowledge and experience and thus undeniable. This is the polar opposite to the self-denial that Christ proposes (Matth 16, 24).


7. Stillness, holiness and the Liturgy

Screens make us into passive consumers desensitising us to acoustic and visual noise in general and specifically making us numb to what is happening in the Liturgy. The Liturgy is the place and time where the Kingdom of God is coming down to us in order to transform us. God does net dwell in scatteredness, noise and chaos “For God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.” (1st Cor 14, 33). How much order do we find in our services?

Through the centuries the fathers sighed about the disorder and lack of focus in their flock, it goes back as far as St. Paul. Although it is true that inner peace amidst outer chaos is true peace, and outer peace without inner peace is nothing, it’s one thing when talking about difficult circumstance people were living in, and another talking about the Liturgy and prayer itself. If we truly want to connect with God, is chaos inside and around us helpful? Do smart phones aid or hinder us in this endeavor?

We know from God’s Revelation to Elijah that God is not in the loud and spectacular wind, storm, fire or earthquake but in “a still small voice” (1st Kings 19,11-13). We must also realise that Elija was alone in a cave, again in his quite “secret place” (Matth 6, 6). Will the voice come to us while our Nous is occupied with worldly stuff and distracted by noise? The earlier mentiond Saints Symoen the New Theologeon, Gregory Palamas and Jospeh the Hesychast were examples of this practice of stillness, or Hesychia, and were therefore by grace granted the vision of the uncreated light – which St. Gregory calles the Kingdom and salvation itself.

Why is this important in regards to children? Why should parents help their kids in a spiritual struggle that sounds like something for monastics? Because there isn’t a gospel for monastics and a separate one for lay people. So if we regard ourselves as orthodox, then we want to do God’s will and we want to help our kids to do the same. The holy Apostle Peter explains God’s will to us in his first Epistle in plain terms: “…as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy.”’ (1st Peter 1, 15-16) Here’s the simple truth: Christ demands from us to become saints: “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matth 5, 48) This applies to our children as well. This is not an option, this is an obligation. We must realise that there is no sainthood with a scattered Nous addicted to screens.

Humans are memetic creatures, we learn by imitating. Children watch and imitate us when we pray or not pray, how we behave in times of hardship and trail, they also learn from us how to behave in church. They learn from us the meaning, significance and purpose of the Liturgy - or they don’t. How do we behave in the Liturgy then? Is our conduct worthy of the Kingdom of God, because when the priest begins with “Blessed the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” it means that the Kingdom is now. Do we participate with fearful expectation and longing? Or are we occupied with other things? Do we want our children to imitate Saints who mystically represent the Cherubim carrying the gifts into the Holy of Holies in order to receive the king of the universe? Or do we want them to imitate the money changers and those selling animals in the Holy Temple? You know what Christ did to those people. (Matth 21, 12)

If worship is the struggle to love the “Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mk 12, 30) and if it also means to pray that we are able to “let us commend ourselves and one another and our whole life to Christ our God”, then bringing a device that seems to be our true master to Church where this worship and this hope takes place is straight idolatry. “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matth 6, 24)

Some priests even call it a crime to disturb the Liturgy and the prayer of others. Respect towards prayer should be learned early. In the Gospel according to Luke at the start of the elefenth chapter, right before the Lord’s prayer, we see that when “… it came to pass, as He [Christ] was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, that one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.”. Let us notice that the disciple did not interrupt but waited for Christ to finish praying. We also see that people need instruction on how to pray and that prayer comes to us from holy God inspired men, prayer comes from the Holy Spirit. Parents need to become teachers of prayer for their children by instruction but more importantly by example. They have to demonstrate consistently their trust in prayer, no matter what happens.


8. Access to the world and holistic learning

Now let us look at the third aspect of how screen media alters us and our children and start to connect everything so far with some practical solutions.

Screens alter our access to the world. They do this by addressing mainly two of our senses, that of sight and that of hearing - and more subtly that of touch. Although moving images activete in us a whole array of bodily processes because the visual faculty is connected to the motor cortex, so that our bodies get ready unconsciously to do something just be looking at things in the world – a glass activates the readyness of the hand to grip it – this does however not mean that screen media ist therefore addressing all senses, it just stimulates an expectation that ccan not be fullfilled and provides a perverted surrogate of the real experience.

God gave us more than theses two or three senses to experience as much of His creation as possible, or to be more precise, in order for us to glorify Him and His love and beauty that permeates creation through our created senses, so that creation can marvel at God who resides in it. This is true self-knowledge and the answer to the question that plagues many adolescents but also grown-ups: Who am I..? Without God modern man thinks that he can be everything, but in fact he is nothing and without Christ can do nothing (Jh 15, 5).

The biggest part of our brain is occupied with the visual, we read images quicker than words. In the garden Eve “saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes” (Gen 3, 6). Throughout Genesis 1 God saw that it was good. Just as the nations, the Israelites too longed for a visual representations of God and made idols. God knew that his creature will need created things to help it contemplate the immaterial and the divine, as St John of Damascus says in his defence of Holy Icons. There is something peculiar about our sight and the fathers implore us to watch over our eyes, because through vision thoughts enter our mind and feed our passions easily which once again scatter and darken our Nous.

Now, our children are not monastics living in the desert rejecting the things of this world, they are rather in the process of exploration, growth and learning. The kind of learning that is imprinted the deepest is when all senses are active during the learning process. So if children are addicted to media that overstimulates the sense of sight - which as we heard is at least spiritually ambivalent if not dangerous - and understimulates the other senses, balance needs to be reestablished. The best way to foster this balanced learning is by making things with one’s own hands, ideally things that are useful. Touchscreens deprive us and our children of the full range and subtleness of our sense of touch, which once crippled will estrange us from even wanting to do things with our hands. This is mostly underestimated. On the topic of making things with our hands and what incredible effect it has on us, I recommend a book by Tim Ingold called simply “Making”.

From the book’s description: “Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives.” The author “advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or ‘correspond’, with one another in the generation of form.” He is not a Christian but what he is unconsciously talking about is learning through communion with creation. When after the fall God said to Adam that “cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Gen 3, 17), it remains true that we have to impose our will forcefully on creation in order to survive, however modern man has perfected this to a highly destructive and suicidal scale. What Ingold implies is neither an utopia where man does not have to rule over creation nor does he advocate for the exploitation of the world, he rather shows by example and experiment we live and learn through participation and leaving room for being changed by what we do. This is true because God created us for growth and development. So do we want to be changed by communion with God and creation holistically, or by our smart phone who serve our egos and passions?


9. Art, craft and making things

This - strangly enough - leads us to the traditional definition of art because now we realise that the purpose of a thing is put in it by humans.
Modern man regards art as the thing on the wall, for most of us art is an object. For the ancients however art was the purposeful making of a thing that was useful to the community, art was the skilful doing of something, be it painting, dancing, cooking, knitting, woodworking, welding, gardening, and so on. Today it would be called craft, but it’s actually art, true art. Here again I highly recommend the short book “Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art” by Ananda Coomaraswamy on that topic, where he does away with our notion of high art as giving man meaning, it’s rather elitist, egotistical and not community building.

Craft fosters intelligence and fine motor skills, it fosters embodied wisdom about the world, it keeps people healthy and grounded, no wonder monastics are to pray and work with their hands. Also since craft produces something useful, it implants in us the value of serving others through our work. Additionally such work results in a material, tangible thing being made. A screen does not provide such a result. When our children see us work on something, let there be no music playing, let them witness our focus on our task and our inner stillness and prayful disposition, our Nepsis, so they can see someone who is not distracted but can be with God while doing a task and still watchful without ignoring them. They can also understand that the Jesus Prayer is not meaningless chatter and useless gossip. They can see someone who is peaceful and thankful to God.

So in the end kids need to be lead by example into prayer and into feeling creative and useful through craft. That way it might be possible to turn back some of the effects of the modern world like scatteredness, bisembodyment, selfishness, lack of responsibility, self-realisation, consummerism, lack of meaning and purpose, etc.

Briefly some words regarding art education where I can pull from concrete personal experience.

There are university professors who know some of the problems and methods mentioned so far and who try to teach their students, who study to become art teachers, new and better ways of teaching art. There are however three problems in my view. Firstly the students themselves are a product of a broken system and before they can even understand the new philosophy they need to unlearn the old one. Secondly in almost all cases the students are skillwise not suited for the job, they never learned to draw, paint or sculpt, what’s worse is that by being accepted into art academy they were lead into thinking that this meant that they were talented. Thirdly those few who are skilled in the end do not become teachers but choose to become galery artist for the art market instead because self-realisation, material success and fame through selfexpression are core values deeply connected to modern art and contradict the notion of responsibility for and service to others.


10. Conclusion

Let us conclude, repeat the obvious, state the uncomfortable truth and try to give some inspiration for action.
Smart phones, screens, digital and social media, and being constantly connected to the internet is bad for us and our children. They kill the soul, scatter the Nous, suffocate prayer, they atomise us, they makes into lonely and depressed judges. They become black wholes for our attention and thus restructure and reevaluate our habits and rituals, making us serve them. They create in us a false sense of immortality and omnipresence by sucking us in into a state of mind where we forget time and space, where we forget God and the fight for true eternity, where we forget death.

We use a device to console and numb ourselves from the effects the device creates. Just like the great philosopher of our times Homer Simpson said talking about alcohol: “Ah alcohol, the origin of and solution to all of man’s problems.” By using the technology and consuming media, we create psychological and spiritual problems, wounds and illnesses in the soul, and then try to get rid of the wounds and the pain by using more theologies and consuming more media. This is the sin of gluttony. The desert fathers had no screens nor social media and didn’t need to read papers on the psychological effects of these things, they understood both the simplicity and complexity of man and formulated plainly that fasting is the solution to greed. The Lord himself famously said that certain demons can only be cast out by prayer and fasting (Matth 21, 17). So if we want our children to be better and be healthy in a world that’s ill, if we want to build something for our children in the spirit of Orthodoxy, then we must understand that the spirit of orthodoxy is the spirit of the holy fathers and mothers which is the spirit of Christ. We can only do this if we start with fasting and prayer as the they did, as Christ did himself, always.

The stories in the Bible tell us that humans are very bad at putting the lid on so-called progress, it is very hard for us to cut down a technology we got used to despite the harm it causes. This is one difference between knowledge and wisdom. Regarding online schooling we should always be alert and try to discern when the technology beguiles us, makes us complacent and lets us forget that the aim should be face to face education and interaction and not remaining disembodied in front of screens. Once we get used to the compromise, we accept it as normal or even defend it as good.

Let us never forget that we use our clouded judgment to judge things that are designed to cloud our judgment and distract us from God. So we need wise ascetics who cleasend their hearts and discernment, we need spiritual guidance, and we need obedience. We need trust and patience to wait for the fruits of this obedience and we need to pray for strength to endure the hardships on this path. Otherwise what’s the point of being so-called orthodox?

As I am unfortunately still dependent on my smartphone for work at the moment, or at least I think I am, I will – with great caution - leave Paul Kingsnorth with the closing words: “Take your smartphone into the garden and smash it with a hammer.” May we strive towards this, I am definitely aiming for it, because worrying about the consequences of living without a cell phone shows a lack of trust in God.

Thank you for your attention.

I thank Sister Iosophia, Matushka Anastasia and Dr. Valentina Tarkovska for organising this event and for the invitation. I also thank the attendees for their attention and for participating in the disscussion.

St. Patrick of Ireland

This talk was given at the Orthodox Educational Workshop held on Friday, 28.03., and Saturday, 29.03.2025, at the Monastery of the Life-Giving Spring in Roscommon, Ireland – and edited afterwards to factor in the results of the following discussions.